I, for one, welcome our new computer overloards!

Hi everyone

It has been quite a week on the technology front with IBM's Watson cleaning up on Jeopardy. A good show, by the way and one that, until now, only humans could compete.

While Watson doesn't think like a person, or think at all, actually, it does give us some visibility on how Humans don't think and what we may be able to do with technology like that IBM has created.

A great article on the Watson experience can be found in this month's Atlantic but I do agree that this technology, particularly given its pattern finding capabilities will be incredibly powerful in terms of research with large quantities of data.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/is-it-time-to-welcome-our-new-computer-overlords/71388/


With Watson winning, a prize of $1,000,000 was to be awarded to the charity of IBM's choice. One of the charities selected with the World Community Grid ( http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ ) which I then investigated. This is basically similar to the SETI@Home project setup about a dozen years ago. It leverages a community of members who give unused cycles on their computers to solving broken down components of large problems in investigations underway by research organizations. This sort of approach is great for modeling problems such as molecular shapes, materials development, biochemical research and the like or just where there is a lot of data to be processed. Well, being the creature that I am, I immediately signed up. You will see the Grid's banner along with my latest stats at the bottom of this blog. Both my laptop and my rather overpowered desktop/multimedia machine are running the application. My multimedia box is an i7 Quad Core, hyperthread machine with 12 GBytes of RAM and a ridiculous 18 TBytes of disk. I could not, for the life of me, get that processor up to 20% utilization until I loaded the Grid software. Now, with no impact on performance for any of the other things I do with it, I am averaging 80%! Wow! And I get to help cure childhood cancer too. That makes me feel even better about my contribution that Suzanne Somers feels about hers! I least I am working with people who are educated, smart and honest.

http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-human-condition/2009/10/23/breaking-health-author-suzanne-somers-mostly-wrong-about-science-medicine.html

One last thought on Grid Computing, if we are doing what we currently are doing as early adopters with free cycles on PCs, what are the possiblities when there are a couple of billion smartphones on the planet?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/02/urban-supercomputers.php?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29&utm_content=Seesmic

Now, onto our last new bit of technology on today's blog. I am slowly moving paperless in my life. Both at work, I co-own a paperless computing company, and in my private life by the elimination of paper books and magazines from my home but with the edition of two iPhones, an iPad and a Sony eReader, I am trying to do my sustainable bit. As well as saving a fair bit of money and reading more, rather than less.

Well, if I can do that, why can't our technologically sophisticated children. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the iSchool initiative.




Wow! What a great time to be alive! Next blog is on the space program!

Paul

Science and Technology Smorg!

Hi everyone and Happy Valentine's Day!

I have a couple of really interesting articles here in the blog today - this has been an interesting week from a science and technology point of view.

Any Jeopardy fans out there? Tonight begins the latest Jeopardy Challenge with the two greatest Jeopardy champions of all time taking on Watson, a specially designed computer which plays the game. This is a much bigger challenge that simply playing chess because Jeopardy questions are contextual, nuanced and often include puns. The background to this effort on the part of IBM is explored in the PBS NOVA show The Smartest Machine on Earth: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth.html


The tricky thing is modeling a vast data set to look for reliable patterns which allow the computer to connect the question to the correct answer.


Second up is an article in The Economist on Three Dimensional printing as a form of manufacturing. They can now print anything from titanium aircraft parts down to complete grandfather clocks which work perfectly right out of the printer. Manufacturing costs will come down, wasted materials will vanish and they are doing this today: http://www.economist.com/node/18114327


A Valentine's present from NASA. A few years back, a spacecraft named Deep Impact sent a perpetrator probe to impact with a comet called Temple-1 and then photographed the entire thing. The one thing they weren't able to photograph as the crater created - too much dust and gas generated by the impact. Tonight, a second spacecraft named Stardust, which has already returned samples from the coma of another comet, has been re-purposed to fly by Temple-1 and see if it can spot the crater. I know what I will be watching on NASA TV at 11:30 PM!

http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov/


We live in interesting times and that is a good thing!

Be brave.

Paul

Disruptive Science

Hi everyone,

Just wrote a blog on Tablets as Disruptive Technology. I now want to talk a bit about Disruptive Science.

The NASA Kepler Spacecraft has the unique mission of finding planets, very special planets around other stars and specifically planets that are of a type and in orbits which could conceivably support life as we know it. Well, less that two years in there are over 1200 candidate planets with 50 odd that could, potentially, support life. That is in addition to the 519 extra solar planets that we have already discovered.

This article on SpaceRef.com describes the news well: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=32632

Why is this disruptive, well on the surface it isn't, but something will change very radically in our world when we discover life on other planets. This brings that day a bit closer and it will happen.

Here are three other disruptive science that is looming over us:

1. Investigations of how the human brain works - specific brain regions have specific functions, memory works in specific ways, consciousness exists due to biological processes and brain structures. Crack these items and we could be looking at direct computer interfaces to the brain, machine augmented telepathy and, wait for it, the big one... Immortality! Will it happen quickly, well, don't expect your grandchildren to tell you about it.
2. Detailed understanding of the human genome. Right now we have it mapped but what the genes do, understanding that will lead to better understanding of diseases, highly tailored drug and treatment regimes and gene therapies. Implications include the extension of human life span as well as the elimination of cancer.
3. Research into plant and animal genomes. Kind of an extension of 2 but, understand this, we need GM crops and foods. We don't need organic farming (remember Organic Food is no better for you, costs more and is way less efficient), we need ways to grow animal protean in a factory, not on feed lots. Implications here: feeding a growing world population, reduction of eating of animals (while still eating meat, yum!).

Well, time will tell, we may see some of this or not, but great news about Kepler!!!

Paul